At the Federation International de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 2010, held in South Africa, Adidas and Nike provided their respective sponsored teams with kits containing performance polyester fabrics made from recycled materials in Taiwan.

This is no accident. Taiwanese firms have been carefully cultivating their lead over other Asian countries in functional fibres and fabrics for performance apparel for about 15 years.

More recently, emphasis has been placed on sustainable technologies and recycled synthetic fibres.

The need for Taiwan's textile industry to transform itself was becoming apparent at the time of the first TITAS (Taipei Innovative Textile Application Show) in 1997.

At that time, the industry in Taiwan comprised as many as 6,000 mills with a combined annual turnover of NT$680 bn (US$23.7 bn). Even so, the writing was on the wall for rapid change.

Today the industry is only a fraction of what it was then in terms of size, but it is probably much more focused.

According to the secretary general of the Taiwan Textile Federation (TTF), Justin Huang, 1997 was "the time of the first Asian financial crisis, but also of the huge build-up of textile operations in China. We quickly realised we would be unable to compete in any way with China on volume, but we were also experiencing a labour shortage at that time, which added to our problems."